A cry shook him from his thoughts. He stopped. The cry came again, clear and sharp. He could hear the sound of feet scrabbling on stone from around a corner a few paces ahead. Akil was moving before another thought passed through his mind. His blade was in his hand as he came around the corner. The leatherbound hilt of the knife felt familiar and warm in his grip. He remembered his grandfather smiling as he had given it to him. Curved and double-edged, every man and woman on Tallarn carried a knife like this.

Akil turned the corner. The street beyond was narrow, the buildings to either side pressing close to pinch off the failing light. There were two of them, one a mound of flesh and muscle, the other thin and gangling. A third figure lay huddled on the ground. In the low light the men looked like blurred silhouettes, bodies and limbs. One of them lashed a kick into the figure on the ground. A cry cracked the air again.

‘Give us the coin, old man,’ said the thinner of the two. Akil was three paces away. The big man turned. Akil had the impression of a wide face and saw the glitter of an eye as it fastened onto him. The big man opened his mouth to shout, his hand moving towards his own knife.

‘If you want to know a people’s character, look at their weapons,’ his grandfather had said, ‘and we of Tallarn are children of the knife.’

The big man’s blade lashed out, its edge a twilight glitter. Akil ducked under the blow and his own knife flicked across the man’s thigh. The man yelled. Akil came up and sliced across his knife-arm above the elbow.

The man’s blade fell from his fingers, blood streaming black down his slack arm. He looked around for his friend but the thinner man was already running. Akil took a pace back and met his foe’s eyes. The man hesitated. Akil brought his own knife up slowly so that it caught the light. Then the man nodded and limped away, trailing a line of dark drops on the stones of the street.

Akil watched him go and wiped and sheathed his blade. He looked to the figure on the ground. A worn face looked up at him as he bent down, old, with dust worked into the creases and framed by grey hair and beard.

‘Can you stand?’ asked Akil.

The old man grimaced, shifted and nodded.

‘Thank you, honoured worthy,’ said the old man. Akil could hear the age and lack of teeth in the man’s speech, but the words almost made him smile. ‘Honoured worthy’ was a form of address already antiquated before compliance. Akil noticed the grey folded cloth of the man’s clothes, frayed and stained with sweat and dust. The man was a rustic from one of Tallarn’s less developed settlements.